About Us

Richard Widick (IICAT:1/14/21)

In 2011, we created IICAT with the publication of this mission statement: “In a world beset by climate change, everything, including environmental, media, social and literary theory, must be revised and reconsidered.”

Our mission includes contributing to this transformation by practicing the craft of public sociology and environmental theory.

This website is the core medium by which we make our investigations public, but we also publish our work in standard academic journals as well as participate in the public sphere Climate Justice Movement and in the political sphere of the UN climate talks.

Michael Dorsey, John Foran, and Richard Widick archive their climate research and related writings on these pages.

Widick’s page doubles as an archive of digital sources for his research, which he presents in a way that maps out how he sees the challenge of climate change (science), what’s driving it (fossil-fueled economic maldevelopment in its phase of globalization), who is trying to fairly mitigate it (the climate justice movement), and who is doing what to govern it (global environmental governance).

Founding IICAT scholars John Foran and Richard Widick have represented the University of California as official Observer Delegates to the UNFCCC at COPs 17 – 25, from Durban to Doha, Warsaw, Lima, and crucially Paris in 2015.  Widick carried the research forward at COP 22 in Marrakech 2016, COP 23 in Bonn 2017, COP 24 in Katowice, Poland 2018 and COP 25 in Madrid, Spain.

In Paris, the nations adopted the first ‘universal’ climate treaty—at a conference convened in the middle of a crisis in French society… the terror attacks of November 13, 2015 that provoked the Hollande government to declare a state of emergency and ban the large scale environmental protests that were already in the process of converging on the UN climate talks.

No Seattle in Paris. Not this time.

Once again, the (media) Spectacle of terrorism reigned.

In this way, the outcome, the treaty, the processes constitutive of emergent global environmental governance, and thus the fate of the climate system, the species, the nations and indeed the world reveal their truly mediated dimension.

At IICAT we foreground this role of media by dialing in on the technological conditions of possibility of the economic, public and political spheres, as well as the individual actors and variously collective social forces that animate them.

We created this Institute for the purpose of entering this media fray and inserting our climate-focused social science research into the wider public debate.

It is our tool for institutionally participating in and contributing to the production and implementation of the new treaty, which went into effect in 2020.

We have since added two additional scholars who each in their own way use media inventively to participate in, learn about and shape the unfolding climate crisis.

We met Dr. Michael K. Dorsey at 17th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC, convened in Durban, South Africa, December 2011 — the birth site of the Paris Agreement — and since that time he has generously brought us inside his decades long study of climate politics in general, and UN the climate negotiations in particular.

Over the years Dorsey has represented several organizations as an official Observer Delegate to the UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COPs), which he has attended nearly every year since since they began in 1995 at COP 1 in Berlin.

At the Rio Earth Conference in 1992, Dorsey left an early mark on the process when security forcefully removed him for publicly insisting on better representation for the least powerful and most affected members of society.  This event is recorded in David Helvarg’s film Green For Life (find it here on IICAT or here on YouTube).  At the Rio +20 Conference in 2012, Dorsey again left his mark, as evidenced in his interview on Free Speech TV.

Dr. Adrian Nel, currently Professor of Development Studies at KwaZulu Natal University, South Africa, joined IICAT in 2014 and coordinated the IICAT Biosphere Defense Project (2014-2016).

Many thanks to Dr. Nel for bringing his deep experience from the horizon of carbon sequestration debates in sub-Saharan Africa, where he continues to study the transformation of rural life ways in the context of encroaching global mandates for carbon sequestration in the African forestry and agricultural sectors.

Dorsey, Foran and Widick are presently designing the next phase of IICAT’s mission, which will focuses on the social forces constitutive of the crucial Paris Agreement on Climate Change in the crucial years 2020-2025, the first five years of the Paris Agreement, focusing on its effects on human rights and climate justice in the new policy domains into which the Agreement is promising to pump hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years and decades.

>> READ MORE about the IICAT Logo, our mission and methods, and our roots in critical theory …